The measured, synchronous movement of children on the swings can
encourage preschoolers to cooperate on subsequent activities, University
of Washington researchers have found.A study by the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) shows the potential of synchronized movement in helping young children develop collaborative skills. The study is published online in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.“Synchrony enhances cooperation, because your attention is directed
at engaging with another person, at the same time,” explained Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, a postdoctoral researcher at I-LABS.“We think that being ‘in time’ together enhances social interaction in positive ways.”Previous studies, including others by Rabinowitch, have linked music
and being in sync with other pro-social behaviors, such as helping,
sharing and empathizing, among young children: Marching together to a
song, for example, might prompt one child to share with another. In this
study, Rabinowitch, along with I-LABS co-director and psychology
professor Andrew Meltzoff, sought to focus on movement alone, without music, and examined how children cooperated with one another afterward.

Two girls work together to maneuver objects through a puzzle.Photo: I-LABS

Cooperation — adapting to a situation, compromising with someone
else, working toward a common goal — is considered a life skill, one
that parents and teachers try to develop in a child’s early years.
For the I-LABS study, researchers built a swing set that enabled two
children to swing in unison, in controlled cycles of time. Pairs of
4-year-olds — who were unfamiliar to one another — were randomly
assigned to groups that either swung together in precise time, swung out
of sync with each other, or didn’t swing at all. The pairs in all three
groups then participated in a series of tasks designed to evaluate
their cooperation. In one activity, the children played a computer game
that required them to push buttons at the same time in order to see a
cartoon figure appear. Another, called the “give and take” activity,
involved passing objects back and forth through a puzzle-like device.Read more...Source: UW Today

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.